"Give me your revolver."
The policeman took off his belt and handed it over. Having replaced the two spent shells with new rounds, the mayor put them in his pocket and gave the revolver to another policeman. The blond giant, who, seen from close by, seemed illuminated by an aura of childishness, let himself be led to the next cell. There he got completely undressed and gave his clothes to the mayor. Everything was done unhurriedly, each one knowing the action that corresponded to him, as in a ceremony. Finally the mayor himself closed the dead man's cell and went out onto the courtyard balcony. Mr. Carmichael was still on the stool.
Led to the office, he didn't respond to the invitation to sit down. He remained standing in front of the desk, with his clothes wet once more, and he barely moved his head when the mayor asked him if he'd been aware of everything.
"Well, then," the mayor said. "I still haven't had time to think about what I'm going to do, or even if I'm going to do anything. But no matter what I do," he added, "remember this: like it or not, you're in on the deal."
Mr. Carmichael remained absorbed in front of the desk, his clothes sticking to his body and a beginning of tumefaction in his skin, as if he still hadn't floated to the surface on his third night as a drowned man. The mayor waited uselessly for a sign of life.
"So take the situation into account, Carmichael: we're partners now."
He said it gravely and even with a touch of drama. But Mr. Carmichael's brain didn't seem to register it. He remained motionless facing the desk, swollen and sad, even after the armored door had closed.
In front of the barracks two policemen held Pepe Amador's mother by the wrists. The three seemed to be at rest. The woman was breathing with a peaceful rhythm and her eyes were dry. But when the mayor appeared in the door she gave off a hoarse howl and shook with such violence that one of the policemen had to let her go and the other one pinned her to the ground with a wrestling hold.
The mayor didn't look at her. Bringing the other policeman with him, he confronted the group that was witnessing the struggle from the corner. He didn't address anyone in particular.
"Someone of you," he said. "If you want to avoid something worse, take this woman home."
Still accompanied by the policeman, he made his way through the group and reached the courthouse. He found nobody there. Then he went to Judge Arcadio's house and pushing open the door without knocking, he shouted:
"Judge."
Judge Arcadio's wife, overwhelmed by the thick humors of her pregnancy, answered in the shadows.
"He left."
The mayor didn't move from the threshold.
"For where?"
"Where else would he go?" the woman said. "Some shitty whore place."
The mayor signaled the policeman to go in. They passed by the woman without looking at her. After turning the bedroom upside down and realizing that there weren't any men's things anywhere, they went back into the living room.
"When did he leave?" the mayor asked.
"Two nights ago," the woman said.
The mayor needed a long pause to think.
"That son of a bitch," he suddenly shouted. "He can hide a hundred feet underground, he can crawl back into the belly of his whore mother, but we'll haul him out dead or alive. The government has a very long arm."
The woman sighed.
"May God listen to you, Lieutenant."
It was beginning to grow dark. There were still groups being kept at a distance by policemen at the corners of the barracks, but they'd taken Pepe Amador's mother home and the town seemed peaceful.
The mayor went straight to the dead man's cell. He had them bring a piece of canvas and, aided by the policeman, he put the cap and glasses on the corpse and wrapped it up. Then he looked in different parts of the barracks for pieces of cord and wire and tied the body in a spiral from neck to ankles. When he finished he was sweating, but he had a recovered look. It was as if physically he had gotten rid of the weight of the corpse.
Only then did he turn on the light in the cell. "Get the shovel, the pick, and a lantern," he ordered the policeman. "Then call Gonzalez, go to the rear courtyard, and dig a good, deep hole in the rear, where it's drier." He said it as if he'd been thinking up each word as he said it.
"And remember one messy thing for the rest of your life," he concluded. "This boy never died."
Two hours later they still hadn't finished digging the grave. From the balcony, the mayor realized that there was nobody on the street except for one of his men who was mounting guard from corner to corner. He turned on the stairway light and went to relax in the darkest corner of the anteroom, hearing only the spaced cries of a distant curlew.
Father Angel's voice drew him out of his meditation. He heard him first talking to the policeman on guard, then to someone who was with him, and lastly he recognized the other voice. He remained leaning over in the folding chair, until he heard the voices again, inside the barracks now, and the first footsteps on the stairs. Then he reached his left arm out in the dark and grabbed the carbine.
When he saw him appear at the head of the stairs, Father Angel stopped. Two steps behind was Dr. Giraldo, in a short jacket, white and starched, and a satchel in his hand. He displayed his sharpened teeth.
"I'm disappointed, Lieutenant," he said in a good humor. "I've been waiting all afternoon for you to call me to do the autopsy."
Father Angel had his transparent and peaceful eyes fixed on him, and then he turned them on the mayor. The mayor smiled too.
"There'll be no autopsy," he said, "since there's no dead body."
"We want to see Pepe Amador," the curate said.
Holding the carbine barrel down, the mayor continued talking to the doctor. "I do too," he said. "But there's nothing we can do." And he stopped smiling when he told him:
"He escaped."
Father Angel came up another step. The mayor raised the carbine in his direction. "Stay right where you are, Father," he warned. In his turn, the doctor advanced a step.
"Listen to one thing, Lieutenant," he said, still smiling. "It's impossible to keep secrets in this town. Ever since four in the afternoon on everybody knows that they did the same thing to that boy that Don Sabas did with the donkeys he sold."
"He escaped."
Watching the doctor, he barely had time to put himself on guard as Father Angel came up two steps all of a sudden with his arms uplifted.
The mayor released the safety catch with a crisp blow by the edge of his hand and remained planted with his legs apart.
"Halt," he shouted.
The doctor grabbed the priest by the sleeve of his cassock. Father Angel began to cough.
"Let's play clean, Lieutenant," the doctor said. His voice hardened for the first time in a long while. "That autopsy has got to be done. Now we're going to clear up the mystery of the fainting spells prisoners have in this jail."
"Doctor," the mayor said, "if you move from where you are, I'll shoot you down." He barely turned his glance toward the priest. "And that goes for you too, Father."
The three remained motionless.
"Besides," the mayor went on, addressing the priest, "you ought to be pleased, Father. That boy was the one who was putting up the lampoons."
"For God's love," Father Angel began to say.
The convulsive cough wouldn't let him go on. The mayor waited for the attack to pass.
"Now just listen to this mess," he said to them. "I'm going to start counting. When I reach three, I'm going to fire at that door with my eyes closed. Just be aware of that, now and forevermore," he warned the doctor explicitly. "The little jokes are over. We're at war, Doctor."
The doctor dragged Father Angel away by the sleeve. He began his descent without turning his back on the mayor, and suddenly he began to laugh out loud.
"I like it this way, General," he said. "Now we really are beginning to understand each other."
"One," the mayor counted.
They didn't hear the next number. W
hen they separated by the corner of the barracks, Father Angel was demolished and had to turn his face away because his eyes were wet. Dr. Giraldo gave him a pat on the shoulder without ceasing to smile. "Don't be so surprised, Father," he told him. "All of this is life." On turning the corner by his house, he looked at his watch in the light of the lamppost: It was a quarter to eight.
Father Angel couldn't eat. After curfew sounded he sat down to write a letter, and he was leaning over the desk until after midnight while the thin drizzle erased the world around him. He wrote in an implacable way, forming even letters with a tendency toward preciosity, and he did it with such passion that he didn't dip his pen again until he'd scratched out as many as two invisible words, scraping the paper with the dry pen.
On the following day, after mass, he put the letter in the mail in spite of the fact that it wouldn't go out until Friday. During the morning the air was damp and cloudy, but toward noontime it became diaphanous. A lost bird appeared in the courtyard and spent almost a half hour giving little invalid leaps among the spikenards. It sang a progressive note, rising up an octave each time until it became so sharp that one could only imagine it.
On his twilight walk, Father Angel felt certain that all afternoon he'd been followed by an autumnal fragrance. At Trinidad's house, while he kept up a sad conversation about the infirmities of October, he thought he identified the smell that Rebeca Asis had exhaled in his study one night.
On his way back he'd visited Mr. Carmichael's family. The wife and eldest daughter were disconsolate, and whenever they mentioned the prisoner's name they hit a false note. But the children were happy without their papa's severity, trying to make the pair of rabbits that the widow Montiel had sent them drink from a glass. Suddenly Father Angel had interrupted the conversation and, making a sign in the air, had said:
"Now I know: it's wolfsbane."
But it wasn't wolfsbane.
Nobody talked about the lampoons. In the hubbub of the latest happenings they were nothing but a picturesque anecdote of the past. Father Angel had proof of it during his evening walk and after prayers, chatting in his study with a group of Catholic Dames.
When he was alone he felt hungry. He prepared himself some fried green banana slices and coffee with milk and accompanied it with a piece of cheese. The satisfaction of his stomach made him forget the smell. While he was getting undressed to go to bed, and then inside the netting, hunting the mosquitoes that had survived the insecticide, he belched several times. He had acid, but his spirit was at peace.
He slept like a saint. He heard, in the silence of the curfew, the emotional whispers, the preliminary testing of the chords tempered by the icy dawn, and lastly a song from another time. At ten minutes to five he realized that he was alive. He sat up with a solemn effort, rubbing his eyelids with his fingers, and thought: Friday, October 21. Then he remembered aloud: "Saint Hilary."
He got dressed without washing or praying. Having corrected the long buttoning of his cassock, he put on the cracked boots for everyday wear, whose soles were becoming detached. On opening the door to the spikenards, he remembered the words of a song.
"'I'll be in your dreams till death,' " he sighed.
Mina pushed open the door of the church while he was giving the first ring. She went to the baptistery and found the cheese intact and the traps still set. Father Angel finished opening the door onto the square.
"Bad luck," Mina said, shaking the empty cardboard box. "Not a single one fell today."
But Father Angel didn't pay any attention. A brilliant day was breaking, with pure, clean air, like an announcement that in that year, too, in spite of everything, December would be punctual. Pastor's silence had never seemed more definitive to him.
"There was a serenade last night," he said.
"Of lead," Mina confirmed. "There was shooting until just a little while ago."
The priest looked at her for the first time. She, too, extremely pale, like her blind grandmother, wore the blue sash of a lay congregant. But unlike Trinidad, who had a masculine air, a woman was beginning to mature in her.
"Where?"
"All over," Mina said. "It seems they were going crazy looking for clandestine fliers. They say they lifted up the flooring of the barbershop, just by chance, and they found guns. The jail is full, but they say men are going into the jungle to join up with guerrilla bands."
Father Angel sighed.
"I didn't notice anything," he said.
He walked toward the back of the church. She followed him in silence to the main altar.
"And that isn't anything," Mina said. "Last night, in spite of the curfew and in spite of the shooting ..."
Father Angel stopped. He turned his parsimonious eyes of innocent blue toward her. Mina also stopped, with the empty box under her arm, and she started a nervous smile before finishing the sentence.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
COLLECTED STORIES
INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
LEAF STORM
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
STRANGE PILGRIMS
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
'My favourite book by one of the world's greatest authors. You're in the hands of a master' Mariella Frostrup 'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on ...'
When newly-wed Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Angela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.
As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night's revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Angela's brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.
'A masterpiece' Evening Standard
'A work of high explosiveness - the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel' The Times
'Brilliant writer, brilliant book' Guardian
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
COLLECTED STORIES
'The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical' John Updike Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Marquez's stories are a delight.
'These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Marquez' Guardian
'Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Sunday Telegraph
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do' Salman Rushdie
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
'These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is the essence of Marquez' Guardian
'Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow ...'
Whilst her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Erendira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The ne
ver-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table - and is fast asleep when it topples over ...
Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount that Erendira must repay her for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Erendira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?
'It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what "fabulous" really means' Time Out
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie 'One of this century's most evocative writers' Anne Tyler
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
LEAF STORM
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie 'Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm'
As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognizable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay.
Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial - and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.
'The most important writer of fiction in any language' Bill Clinton 'Marquez is a retailer of wonders' Sunday Times
'An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate, and extremely funny' Sunday Telegraph
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
'A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn't find. A thrilling miracle of a book' The Times
In Evil Hour Page 16
